half-Life / Hλlf-Life / Counter-Strike 1.0
Released: 1998
Published by: Sierra Studios
Developed by: Valve
Author(s): Ted Backman, Kelly Bailey, Yahn Bernier, Ken Birdwell, Steve Bond, Dario Casali, Marc Laidlaw, Jay Stelly, John Cook, Greg Coomer, Wes Cumberland, John Guthrie, Mona Lisa Guthrie, Michael Harrington, Monica Harrington, Brett Johnson, Chuck Jones, Karen Laur, Randy Lundeen, Yatzse Mark, Lisa Mennet, Gabe Newell.
Half-Life is a first-person shooter released by Sierra Studios in 1998, and developed by Valve Software. While it didn't break any new ground in a technical manner, the immersive storyline being told as you progress and customisable engine was enough to propel it as one of the best FPS ever created.
The Black Mesa Research Facility is an ultra-secret laboratory under a government contract to conduct top-secret and extremely volatile experiments. The scientist Gordon Freeman is a Black Mesa employee. One morning, as usual, he pits his way to the research facility for a run-of-the-mill experiment. However, Gordon comes to realize that it might not be as ordinary as he thought. Odd things happen as he makes his way to one of the Black Mesa test chambers. Even stranger things happen when he begins to move the test sample towards the anti-mass spectrometer.
At that moment, everything goes horribly wrong. Aliens from the dimension Xen suddenly invade the facility, injuring or killing many of the employees. Soon afterwards, marines arrive to contain the situation by killing the aliens as well as the surviving human witnesses. Gordon understands what that means: he will have to fight his way through both aliens and marines to get to the top of the Black Mesa complex and to freedom.
The game is somewhat unique in that the introduction is interactive and uses actual game graphics - it begins with you on the monorail travelling into the Black Mesa facility. You can control where your character looks with the mouse. When you arrive, you take full control - it works really well and through other employees of the facility talking to you when you get close, you are given an idea of what to do.
The game featured both a full one-player storyline as well as multiplayer options with dedicated maps. Multiplayer supported up to 32 players simultaneously playing over a LAN or over the internet.
An unofficial mod was created for Half Life, called Counter-Strike. This originated as a mod for Quake called Navy Seals, and ran on the later GoldSrc engine (a heavily modified version of the Quake engine) which superceded the original Source engine on which Half-Life was based with better gameplay and graphics.
Half-Life was succeeded by Half-Life 2 in 2004